Wicked And Wise

Regular readers of Gates of Vienna know my predilection for re-examining well-known poetry while keeping the great issue of our time in mind. The following work, by the late British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, is particularly apropos.

	Crow’s Elephant Totem Song
	Once upon a time God made this Elephant. Then it was delicate and small It was not freakish at all Or melancholy
	The Hyenas sang in the scrub        You are beautiful— They showed their scorched heads and grinning expressions Like the half-rotted stumps of amputations— We envy your grace Waltzing through the thorny growth O take us with you to the Land of Peaceful O ageless eyes, of innocence and kindliness Lift us from the furnaces And furies of our blackened faces Within these hells we writhe Shut in behind the bars of our teeth In hourly battle with death The size of the earth Having the strength of the earth
	So the Hyenas ran under the Elephant’s tail As like a lithe and rubber oval He strolled gladly around inside his ease But he was not God no it was not his To correct the damned In rage in madness then they lit their mouths They tore out his entrails They divided him among their several hells To cry all his separate pieces Swallowed and inflamed Amidst paradings of infernal laughter.
	At the Resurrection The Elephant got himself together with correction Deadfall feet and toothproof body and bulldozing bones And completely altered brains Behind aged eyes, that were wicked and wise.
	So through the orange blaze and blue shadow Of the afterlife, effortless and immense, The Elephant goes his own way, a walking sixth sense, And opposite and parallel The sleepless Hyenas go Along a leafless skyline trembling like an oven roof With a whipped run Their shame-flags tucked hard down Over the gutsacks Crammed with putrefying laughter Soaked black with the leakage and seepings And they sing: “Ours is the land Of loveliness and beautiful Is the putrid mouth of the leopard And the graves of fever Because it is all we have—” And they vomit their laughter.
	And the Elephant sings deep in the forest-maze About a star of deathless and painless peace But no astronomer can find where it is.

In the elephant we see the America that used to be — ingenuous, open-handed, optimistic about human nature (or in the allegory, Hyena-nature), not freakish or melancholy.

But then came the Hyenas.

Already residing in their hells, obsessed with death, they took advantage of the innocence and openness of America. But we were not God, and did not correct the damned, and our dusty entrails were strewn across the streets of New York, while the infernal laughter of the Hyenas echoed through the streets of Ramallah and Cairo.

And then there was the Resurrection. Deadfall feet? Definitely; marching through the mountain passes of Afghanistan and across the deserts of Iraq. Toothproof body? Absolutely; ask the Marines in Fallujah. Bulldozing bones? Without a doubt; the same ones that knocked over the statues of Saddam.

But what about the completely altered brains?

This is where the analogy falters: our brains are not that different. When we feel compelled to apologize to our enemies for violating their arcane customs, then we acknowledge that our brains are unchanged. When we consider making deals with the Hyenas because they can win an election in Gaza, then we are neither wicked nor wise.

The Hyenas are sleepless, but we are beginning to doze off. When we do, they are ready to come in again and light their mouths for another round. They do what they do because it is all they have.

We need to be a walking sixth sense; the star of peace will simply have to wait.